The Fastest Way to Scale: Leverage Other People's Audiences

0:00Okay, what if I told you the fastest way to double your business wasn't more marketing, not more ads, not more social media, not more salespeople. what if the fastest way to actually double your business was simply gaining access to someone else's audience, someone else's database, because that's exactly how many of the world's fastest growing businesses grow at scale. All right. So today we're talking about one of the most powerful growth strategies that there is in business. Strategic alliances, partnerships, affiliates, joint ventures, host beneficiaries, whatever terminology you want to give it, the ability to leverage trust, relationships and audiences that already exist.

0:38There's someone else's database. And see, when you understand this principle, it gets dramatically easier to grow a business. I remember when I first started out in business, it was like, okay, I don't have a budget to go and do marketing. I don't have all the money to go and convince people to buy from me. I need to find someone who can tell their customers to buy from me. And that was the fastest way I got a massive leap ahead early on in business. So in my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes I see made in marketing is that people try to build everything themselves. They try to build one customer at a time.

1:12Most entrepreneurs, they try and build their own audience, their own leads, their own traffic, their own credibility, their own distribution. What else? It takes years, sometimes even decades to do that. The smartest entrepreneurs ask a different type of question. Who already has the audience that I want? And that question changes it dramatically because it speeds everything up. When I started out, I did a deal with a newspaper group and I did a deal with a radio station group. They both had large databases of customers. The newspaper group had 36 ,000 customers on their database. The radio station had about 8 ,000 customers on their database.

1:54These were business owners that advertised with them. It was like, to me it brought about the power of what what I'd called borrowed trust trust takes years to build partnerships allow you to borrow that trust think about this if I was to recommend someone to you you immediately trust them more why because my trust transfers to you whether you trust me I've said yeah you should do business with this person it transfers across and that's what I mean when I say borrowed trust. It's one of the most powerful forces that you can use in business. And most business owners massively underestimate it and massively underuse it.

2:35It's crazy to me. I wrote a whole book on building a referral-based business because I think that that is one of the fastest ways to grow a company. And the referral lesson, let's start simple. The most basic partnership in the world is a referral from one customer. One business sends one customer to another business or one professional recommends another or one customer introduces another customer. Referrals are powerful because trust already exists. The sale starts at least halfway. Like the sale is almost completed because you've already gained the trust. And that's why in my opinions, partnerships scale faster.

3:15So if I look back at what I could have done in the early days, I could have run ads in that newspaper and eventually got to a few of their customers, or I could partner with the newspaper and have them promote my events for me sort of thing. So if you look at two different paths, okay, path one, build an audience of 10 ,000 people yourself. yourself. Part two, partner with 10 businesses that already have a thousand customers each, 10 ,000 people in total. Obviously, you know which one's faster. By the way, yeah, which one's cheaper, which one's less risky? Most businesses choose the harder path.

3:53The smartest businesses choose leverage. Build a relationship with one person who can get me in front of 10 ,000. Build a relationship, you know one at a time is a tough job if you think of maybe like the joint venture model it's possibly one of the most powerful growth tools in history a joint venture you take two businesses that have a similar audience or one audience in fact you give one opportunity for those two companies to come together and create one promotion it's a shared success the business I mean the beauty of this is really simple when you when you look at it you don't need more customers, you need access to customers.

4:32I want to state that again. You don't need more customers, you need access to more customers. It's too easy for a business to sit down and think, I have to do everything myself versus, oh, I need to build relationships with someone that can bring me a thousand new customers. I'll give you an example. So it's kind of a weird one, but think of a dentist and an accountant example. Think about a dentist, right? Who already has relationships with people the dentist wants maybe an accountant maybe a lawyer financial planner a mortgage broker a business coach like they if you're thinking about it as the dentist you want good professionals as your customer base you think of who has totally different services to you the same audience but different different customer base in the way that you don't sell anything competitive to them.

5:22So if it's got the same audience, a partnership becomes obvious. What if the mortgage broker or the accountant recommended the dentist to their customers? And that to me is just not, it's not complex. It's just, you've got to build those relationships with the strategic partners. You've got to build the relationship with those people so they can give you the referral or the recommendation. If I look at through my career with Action Coach, some of the biggest growth periods came from partnerships, not from advertising. Partnerships, banks, accountants, lawyers. I remember working with several banks and they would put us in front of hundreds of their customers in order to help the customer and help us and help them.

6:11Like there was an accountant I was chatting with, it's got to be three, four weeks back now, down in New Orleans. They recommend their customers to the business coach because the coach helps them grow the business. And if they grow the business and the accountant, they need more accounting work. It's not complex. So I mean, I did work with associations. I remember the Pork Association. I remember the Interior Designers Association. Professional organizers help these sorts of things. Every one of these groups had something valuable, right? Something I wanted, trust. They had built trust with an audience, customer base, members, association groups, you know, they'd built customers and audiences.

6:54Their relationships is really what I wanted. And we helped each other grow. I would send people to them. They would send people to me in some cases, other cases, it was just me to them or them to me. I call it the host beneficiary in many ways because there's a host and there's a beneficiary. It's one of my favorite concepts. Who benefits most when your customer succeeds? And this is where if you think of the highest benefit principle, okay? Again, I'll stay with Action Coach because you kind of understand my business so it makes it a little easier. If Action Coach client doubles their business, who benefits?

7:30Banks. They need more money. They need more lending. They need more credit card processing, et cetera. Accountants, lawyers would benefit. Recruiters benefit. They need more staff. Software providers benefit. They need more computers and more software type thing. All of those people benefit. If you think about the natural alliance partners for yourself, ask yourself a very simple question. Who benefits when my customer wins? And that's really where your strategic alliances begin. If you're struggling with it, just jump on ChatGPT and say, hey, this is my business. Who else serves my customers that is non-competitive to me?

8:05It'll give you associations or businesses or groups, memberships, clubs, etc. I think it's really easy for you to start sitting down and making a list of maybe 20 industries or 20 groups, associations, etc. And within those 20 groups, you might find 5 companies, 10 companies, 4 associations, 10 associations. They're all there waiting for you. That then brings us to maybe affiliate marketing. If you move into affiliates and start thinking about an affiliate is simply someone who gets paid when they help generate business for you. It's that simple. They don't need to deliver. They don't need to service.

8:40They don't need to do any of the work. They simply need to introduce you to other people. The beauty of affiliates is you only pay for results. No result, no cost. Result, you pay. It's buying customers on a performance-based growth strategy. I know for us at Action Coach, we've had affiliates in many different areas over the years. And these are business people that they're happy to promote us to their customer base. And they expect to get some sort of reward for that. There's a reason affiliates work. They already have audiences, right? They already have relationships with those audiences. I know in my restaurants, we oftentimes have affiliate relationships with influencers.

9:20And you start thinking about that. They already have the trust. I'm not buying advertising and hoping I'm leveraging the credibility of that influencer the credibility of that affiliate with their database their customer base whoever it is and that's a very different thing it brings us to that whole idea of if someone else has an audience and I can leverage that audience to come by from me I'm willing to pay them for that you know and And going back to last week, the podcast strategy, and again, I still think this is one of the most overlooked partnership strategies today. Every podcast appearance is essentially a partnership, okay?

10:02Think about it. The host lends you their credibility, their trust, their audience, their attention. They ask you questions that position you in a good light. In exchange, you provide content. You provide value. You provide great answers for their listeners, and that makes it work. it's one of the most efficient growth strategies available. When I start looking back at how many different partnerships we've had to help build Action Coach, it is by far the number one biggest strategy for generating new business to our business. And even like one example is the webinar partnership model. It's a very simple, powerful structure where we do joint webinars.

10:41I've done it where I've had four and five people on the webinar and we all bring our audiences to it. I've done it as live seminars as well. Each partner brings their audience, each partner brings expertise, everybody wins. I've done some of them where it's like a group of 10 people bringing their customers, I'm the one teaching, but their whole customer base wins. The audience gets value, partner strengthens their relationship, you generate leads for yourself. This model works incredibly well when you're offering financial services, professional services, consulting, coaching, anything where there's like a good B2B structure definitely helps build that.

11:20And so I want you to start thinking in terms of rather than how do I get one new customer, how do I get one new partner who brings me 100 new customers? How do I get one new partner who brings me relationships forever and a day? And then one step further than that, how do I get a relationship with someone who brings me 100 people that bring me 100 relationships? You know, there's all that leverage factor of it. I think if we try and do one at a time, it slows us down. I know, and you probably are well aware that I love franchising. I think franchising is a great partnership model. One of the reasons I love it is it's the greatest leverage system I think ever invented.

11:59You create a system, a brand training and support, then your partners come in and grow the market. The franchisee wins because you've built the system, brand training and support. The franchisor, you win. The customer obviously wins because they get access to something they wouldn't have access to before. It's partnerships at scale. And if we can really think about the whole purpose of today, demand generation over supply generation, someone has already done demand and built a database of people and they would be happy to refer those people to you. Okay. And that's where even a a friend of mine, I taught him licensing.

12:41Licensing is a great partnership model. Probably the best in the world at this is the Disney Corporation. You know, how many licenses does Disney have? How many ways does the mouse get sold? How many companies are selling bed sheets and sleeping attire and toys and you name it, it's, Disney's a genius. Licensing follows a similar principle to franchising. You build the IP, the intellectual property, others distribute that. It could be a product that you manufacture others are distributors for it it's you're leveraging other people's effort other people's capital other people's network other people's database other people's customer base i know for me in our restaurant we create a particular type of sauce we create we have a brewery and we build we brew our own beer well the company we buy our other beers from they're our distributor for that so that you know the distribution advantage is another one.

13:35If you think of licensing, it's like strategic growth. Many businesses obsess over their products, very few obsess over their distribution. And products matter, but distribution matters more. The best product with poor distribution loses. The average product with exceptional distribution often wins. McDonald's has more burger sites in the world and they have a better distribution methodology than most burger companies. They don't necessarily have a better burger, just a better distribution system. So partnerships essentially are designed to expand distribution. If I want a distribution into Poland, I need to find a partner in Poland to be my distributor or to be my affiliate or to be my licensee or to be my franchisee.

14:20But it's looking for partners. They could be my joint venture partner. So I want to go back to something I touched on, but think of the 100 partner strategy, right? This is a strategy for you to find 100 partners out there, not 100 customers, 100 strategic partners for your business. And if each of them referred you just one new customer per month, that's 100 customers a month. If each gave you two, you know what I mean? It's no advertising, no cold calling without any real additional marketing spend. Partnerships, what they do is they compound in your business. Every added partnership compounds on the previous ones.

14:58And the greatest thing about your partnerships is you can build the community effect. What do I mean by that? See, partnerships are not just transactional. It's not one at a time. They're relational. And the biggest and the best networks of partners become ecosystems in and of themselves. So for example, I might bring in a partner that is a law firm with my business coaching. I might bring in an accounting firm. I might bring in, bring in, bring in and it creates see the strongest business networks they introduce people to each other they recommend they collaborate they support uh we bring them all together for a luncheon once a month and we build a relationship amongst all of them see the growth accelerates because trust flows through the network i think the biggest partnership mistake that people make is most people approach partnership saying, what can I get?

15:48Rather than the right question is how can I help? When I sit down with an accountant, I'm not looking at how, you know, I interview them and I talk to them about, okay, how do you do business? Who's your ideal customer? Who can I refer to you? If I run into someone, what type of customer? Do you want restaurants? Do you want this? Who do you want? You know, the best partnerships are built on value creation, not extraction. That's just going to be the way it is. You lead with contribution and then the opportunity follows. And that to me is what happens time after time. If you can go and build, I don't know, 20 different types of partners that you would have, maybe it's law firms, maybe it's hairdressers, maybe it's gymnasiums that work for you.

16:31And then you make a list of the top five or 10 in each of those categories, you've hit that hundred. You know, if you're going to build your partnership list, simple exercise, make three lists. Who already serves your ideal customer? Like who is it that you know already serves your best customers? I remember this in clothing business and there was a particular hairdresser that served a lot of our customers, about 30 % of them. There was a particular shoe store, a particular eyewear store that served them. Second, who benefits when my customer succeeds? Back to that earlier question that we have.

17:03And number three, who has the audience I want? Okay, that's where you'll start to see immediate opportunities. If you can get that list, and again, if you're struggling with this, just turn to ChatGPT, feed it the transcript of this session, and ask it to help you with building your lists. Okay, if you take the transcript off of YouTube, it can definitely help you with doing what we're doing here. In essence, the idea of using partnerships means you got to think bigger. If entrepreneurs limit themselves by, you know, the one customer at a time thing, or Or even you might limit yourself with one partnership, one referral partner, one alliance.

17:38I want you to think bigger. What would happen if you built 10 partners, 20, 50, 100, maybe 500 affiliates out there in the world? Now growth starts becoming exponential for your business. It's not about doing it once, okay? It's about doing it dozens of times. What if you employed someone whose whole job was building strategic partnerships for your business? That was their job. Their job was to find strategic partners to grow the business. So if you start, I mean, going back to the questions, every week I give you some questions to think about. Who already has your audience? Who already has your customers or potential customers on their database, on their membership list, on their attendance list?

18:19And who benefits when your customers succeed? What partnerships are you not pursuing is a big question to ask. Like, you know, where are there people that have come that want to have a partnership with you and you haven't pursued it? That's a big part of it. How many strategic partners do you currently have and how could you get them working better? What can you do with those? How many should you have in the business is probably a thing. What geography do you want to have strategic partners in? What industry do you want to have strategic partners in? And that way, you know, if you go back to the common mistakes of building a business, that trying to do it all alone, no referral system, no affiliate system.

18:56Notice the word system there. That's an important part of it. no strategic alliance plan or system. You're leading with extraction, leading with what can I get? That's a big mistake I see people making. So you've got to create the win-win relationships. And if you focus only on advertising, only on direct marketing, and you don't use relationships, the fastest growth often comes through relationships more than advertisements. And I think that's really important part of it. So this week's action challenge is identify 10 potential alliance partners, okay? Five affiliate opportunities, three joint ventures, but get them down on paper.

19:35Get the names, the emails, and just start reaching out to people. Start conversations. Invite them on your podcast. Invite them to a coffee. Invite them to an industry association meeting. Invite them to your networking group, something along those lines. Don't wait until you need partnerships to build them. You build them before you need them. It's a massive aspect of any success is do stuff before you need it. Don't wait till you need it to start building. The relationships might take a month. They might take a week. They might take two years. You never know how long it's going to take to build a great partnership for your business.

20:13So the fastest way to grow isn't always building a bigger audience. Sometimes it's gaining access to someone else's audience. And I can't stress that enough. Partnerships allow you to borrow trust, accelerate growth, and create opportunities that would take years to build on your own. So stop trying to do everything yourself. Growth is a team sport.